The invention relates to automated services, and especially to the automated collection of data and information for personal information managers, personal data assistants (PIM and PDAs), laptops and any type of electronic device that individuals might use in a mobile environment for the containment of personal and business information.
Many of today's organizations are going global, meaning that employees located in one geography might need to interact with their counterparts and customers in another remote geography. In a recent survey conducted in the US, it was found that, last year, American “road warriors” (business people) took 207 million business trips, spending an average of about three and a half days away from the office per trip. (<<media3pub.com/usbank/articles/road_warrior.html>>). Because of this shifting paradigm, employees are often working at remote locations with limited or no real-time access to needed corporate or personal information.
One of the big inhibitors to productivity in this environment is the inability to access needed information to accomplish short term tasks, like finding the right person in a back-office to answer a question, or perhaps reviewing the purchase history of a customer before tomorrow's meeting. Even though many organizations have their own corporate directory holding employee and customer information, they need a way to always have access at their mobile devices to the latest and authentic information available, along with important related business information.
What is needed is a way to ensure that important information is available in one's laptop or mobile device, regardless of where the user might be.
The above problem statement brings forth a number of issues, including the size of corporate databases that encompass multimedia elements, such as graphics, pictures, maps, even video presentations. Important business information might also include information found in customer relations management (CRM) systems, social link networks, blogs, etc.
According to the Wikipedia website (<<wikipedia.org/>>), a mashup is a website or web application that uses content from more than one source to create a completely new service. The origin of the term “mashup” comes from the music industry where a DJ mixes a vocal track from one song with the instrumental track of another. Recently, mashups have started to appear in non-browser based applications like instant messaging, where plug-ins are used to produce compositions of information for end users, like showing directory and social networking data in a chat window. The focus of mashups at the present has been on producing real time compositions for an end user.
There is a long history of caching techniques for specific application domains, such as for relational databases, email systems, and for edge servers in the web. Some of these cache techniques have intelligent features that preload elements of the associated application domains. For example, one known email application fetches copies of email messages when their titles appear on screen in representation of the in-box; a known database application prefetches related table subsets when some table rows are retrieved, if there has been a history of the database application using a query to “join” these related table subsets.
There have also been attempts to replace multiple application access to remote data in mobile devices with a specialized data access client, a matching server extension and an optional middle tier. In this arrangement rules were used to allow those files that were most likely to be needed, based on recent history, to be copied to a mobile device before the device disconnected from a network.